Trader Joe’s Barbeque Popped Potato Chips

The barbeque kind looks just like these, but the bag is bright orange

I am always on the lookout for a way to fulfill my desire for potato chips without giving myself a heart attack from all the saturated fat I would be consuming by eating a bag of Utz everyday. I keep coming across various forms of “popped chips” in grocery stores lately, so when I was at Trader Joe’s I snatched up a bag of Trader Joe’s Barbeque Popped Potato Chips. What are popped potato chips? Not fried or baked, they’re potato chips cooked under heat and pressure until they “pop”. Apparently this means they’re much healthier than regular chips. Side-by-side with Lay’s Barbeque Potato Chips, they contain 30 less calories for a 1 oz serving (in the case of the Trader Joe’s chips, this translates to about 19 chips) and less than half the fat. They are also free of saturated fat and cholesterol. They do, however, contain 20 g of carbohydrates to Lay’s 15 . Curious, I looked at the ingredients. The first ones named are potato flour, potato starch safflower oil and/or sunflower oil, barbecue seasoning, onion and garlic powder. In a nutshell it sounded like a pretty darn good combination of flavors.

Assured that these would not, in fact, kill me, I gave them a try. In one word, these are AWESOME and not lacking in flavor like the sad cardboard excuses for potato chips that baked chips are. Each od the popped chips has a very generous amount of the barbecue seasoning on it, giving the chips the necessary bright orange color. The seasoning had a nice smoky, spicy mesquite flavor to it. They are roughly the same size as regular potato chips, although they are circular and slightly thicker and airier and seemingly grease-less (they do, however, still have a fantastic crunch to them). My only complaint is that they were a little too salty, but it did keep me from eating the whole bag. Overall though, these were absolutely incredible and have officially become my new favorite potato chip! I will have to try the regular store version (Popchips) in comparison.

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 9:12 pm and is filed under Food Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.